Editor's note: This updates with additional comment from a recently retired National Park Service division chief, a union official, and New Mexico's congressional delegation. This is a developing story, be sure to check back for more updates.

One-thousand National Park Service staff were being fired Friday as part of the Trump administration's move to reduce the size of federal government, though the agency was told it could begin hiring 5,000 seasonal workers, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.

“Allowing parks to hire seasonal staff is essential, but staffing cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities. We are concerned about smaller parks closing visitor center doors and larger parks losing key staff including wastewater treatment operators," said Theresa Pierno, NPCA's president and CEO. “Exempting National Park Service seasonal staff from the federal hiring freeze means parks can fill some visitor services positions. But with peak season just weeks away, the decision to slash 1,000 permanent, full-time jobs from national parks is reckless and could have serious public safety and health consequences."

The 1,000 jobs lost were part of more than 2,000 being fired from the Interior Department overall.

The Park Service staff losing their jobs were still on probation, lacked job protection, and had been targeted by the Trump administration. Kristen Brengel, NPCA's senior vice president for government affairs, said the administration used no logic in firing the employees.

"This is completely indiscriminate. They are not looking at what these folks do. They are just slashing the jobs," Brengel said Friday during a recording of the Traveler's weekly podcast to air Sunday. "And the result of this from what we have found out already are that some of the people on their probationary period have jobs like wastewater treatment operators. These are the people who keep parks from smelling like sewers. Several big parks had these positions in a probationary period and will lose these people today."

National Park Service staff at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters did not immediately respond when asked how the positions to be let go would be determined, or how the 5,000 seasonal positions to be hired would be spread across the National Park System.

Phil Francis, executive chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, failed to understand the administration's action.

"At a time when Park Service employee numbers are way down, and visitation is way up, and also considering that the National Park Service's total budget is less than one-16th of 1 percent of the federal budget, it makes no sense to be culling more employees," said Francis, who joined Brengel on the podcast. "Those employees are tomorrow's leaders." 

Representatives with the National Treasury Employees Union (NTU), which representatives hundreds of NPS employees, said the administration would be sued over the firings.

"Our national union will file a lawsuit, will do its best to defend all of the probationary employees and say, 'When you do [a bulk] termination of people, it can't be for [poor job] performance," an NTU chapter leader told the Traveler. "It's purely political. It's without cause. So it should be paused. So maybe we will find a judge that says, 'Hold on a second here,' and make management, make the minions of Musk, have to prove where it was performance."

In Congress, U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), and U.S. Reps. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.), Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), and Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) demanded that the administration halt its "unlawful mass firings of federal employees on probationary status."

“Abruptly terminating these employees without due process would not only undermine the delivery of essential government services but would also have widespread economic consequences for our state. Federal employment is a major contributor to New Mexico’s economy, supporting thousands of families and generating significant local revenue. Large-scale firings of probationary employees would ripple through our communities, reducing consumer spending, straining local businesses, and creating unnecessary economic instability,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter (attached below) to Trump.

The delegation echoed the NTU official's contention that the mass firings were illegal.

"Concerns have already been raised about the legality of these terminations, noting that mass layoffs without individualized assessments violate existing federal workforce statutes. Federal law permits the termination of probationary employees based on performance or conduct," they wrote. "It does not allow for large-scale firings without individualized assessments or adherence to Reduction in Force procedures. Additionally, it explicitly prohibits dismissing probationary employees for partisan political reasons. Federal agencies must be staffed by qualified professionals, not political loyalists.”

The congressional delegation from Utah, which takes pride in its "Mighty Five" — Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion national parks — was silent on the terminations.

Jim Schaberl, who retired in January 2024 from Shenandoah National Park where he was chief of natural and cultural resources, said park managers could be forced to scramble to cover necessary positions to keep their parks operating.

"The crux is that basically anybody who was hired sort of recently is at risk [of being fired], and so it could be across every discipline," he said during a phone call from his Virginia home. "It's not targeted. It sounds like there's some pushback, or at least some some interest in retaining the people who could be flagged as health and safety workers. So maybe some law enforcement, maybe some firefighters."

Schaberl added that superintendents might prioritize law-enforcement rangers, wastewater treatment operators,  water plant operators, and firefighters to the detriment of, perhaps, interpretive rangers or trail workers. Beyond that, he said, some of the probationary workers being let go could have been in line for permanent positions being vacated by retirements, such as his was.

At the Sierra Club, Athan Manuel, director of the organization's Lands Protection Program, said that "[F]iring thousands of federal employees, including those who work to prevent wildfires, won’t lower the price of eggs, but it will put countless communities at risk of devastation. Trump and [Elon] Musk might think of themselves as disruptors, but their actions have consequences. People will be put in harm’s way because of them.”

Staff at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said hundreds of Bureau of Land Management staff in the state were among those losing their jobs.

“Today’s firing of hundreds of staff at the federal Bureau of Land Management is a significant blow to how remarkable public lands and resources in Utah will be managed. Already woefully understaffed and under-resourced, today’s decisions is a self-fulfilling prophecy to downgrade the protection and management of Utah’s redrock country, all while furthering the bogus argument that state or private companies could do a better job of ‘managing’ federal public lands,” said Neal Clark, the organization's Wildlands director.